A normal user's look into the world of 3D Stereo Technologies

The new Dragon Age 2 game is coming on 8th of March, but there a demo available already for a few days, so as a somewhat fan of the RPG genre I downloaded it and tried to play it in stereo 3D mode with the help of 3D Vision. The Dragon Age 2 Demo does support both DX9 and DX11, but in the demo version you are not able to play with the highest quality levels as well as probably not having all the quality controls available. Still the game runs quite decent in stereo 3D mode by default, although there is no official 3D Vision profile available for it yet, the default convergence level needs some adjustment in order for the close-up scenes to be Ok. After adjusting the convergence you should still play with lower depth levels in order to avoid excessive crosstalk/ghosting as well as having some of the objects that are far away from you seem doubled, because of higher separation. There are some elements such as the mouse cursor or the unit info bars that render in 2D and some other minor issues, but then again with lower depth levels these shouldn’t be such an issue for most people.

When running in DX11 mode I’ve noticed that the game is pretty heavy even for top hardware when running in stereo 3D mode, you get unacceptable framerate. There are also some occasional shadow corruption on the terrain (black triangles), and this may be somewhat related to the use of DX11 features as it does not happen in DX9 mode. In DX9 the game is comfortable playable in stereo 3D mode, you get decent framerate, so it seems that the DX11 mode in the demo may be somewhat buggy and hopefully in the final game this issue will be resolved.